Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

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In the Name of the Community 167
In the Name of the Community
Gender, Development and Governance
in Arunachal Pradesh
Deepak K. Mishra and Vandana Upadhyay
With increasing appreciation of the role of institutional factors in the
process of economic development, there has been a greater realisation of
the significance of democratic and humane governance for equitable and
sustainable development. India’s northeastern region is not only one
of the least developed but also one of the most ill-governed parts of the
country. The continuing presence of insurgency and violent ethnic conflicts
in the region has clouded discussions on the political economy of
development of the region. While ethnic conflicts, militant secessionist
movements and insurgency are often described as the result of the lack of
development initiatives on the part of the central and state governments,
the underdevelopment or deceleration of the economies of the Northeast
is often explained in terms of the presence of insurgency and conflicts.
Based on the experience of a relatively peaceful state, Arunachal Pradesh,
this chapter attempts to explain the manifold linkages between the political
economy of development and the crisis of governance in the region.
The central argument is that as a consequence of the ethnicisation of the
development discourse, the rights of various marginalised groups, including
women, suffer in fundamental ways, which often gets concealed
in highly generalised notions of the relatively egalitarian social order in
tribal societies. A number of gender-sensitive indicators of development
throw up disturbing evidences of the marginalisation of women in various
spheres in the state, particularly in recent decades.